Integrity fibre channel card firmware quick dive

I've had a fixation on the firmware of these cards for a while. Why? Because while I never update firmware on LAN cards, I still have many 2Gb fibre cards in my environment and they are based on designs probably made sometime around 2005-2006. Their firmware took a while to become mature and support specifics on the Integrity platform such as vPars, so there have been a few firmware releases in their lifetime.

There are two official and documented ways to update the firmware on QLogic-based fibre cards shipped with Integrity servers running HP-UX. The first one, which is also the easiest, consists of putting in the server or through Virtual Media a recent IA Offline Diagnostics CD (which comes with up to date drivers for many cards) and run fcd_update at the EFI Shell. The other one, which I personally prefer, requires you to copy the firmware files on the EFI partition, reboot to the EFI shell, and run fcd_update from there.

However, few administrators actually need to update this firmware as each release of the HP-UX fcd driver comes with the required RISC firmware and it updates the card automatically if required. The only situation where one might need to update the firmware manually is when booting on SAN as it might require updating the EFI driver. More on this below.

That's where being able to do it online can come handy if you want to save time. Why? Because flashing the firmware offline requires, from my experience, around 10 minutes per port and that can become very cumbersome if you're dealing with a rx8640 with multiple vPars or a Superdome. That online process is not well documented but I found this document here which explains how to do it using fcmsutil. It is actually easy: Simply run fcmsutil once to update the RISC firmware, and run it again for the EFI firmware.

So what is the difference between that RISC and EFI firmware? The same document linked above, although not well written, provides some definite answers. The RISC firmware is the storage processor on the card, which, not surprisingly, is based on a RISC chip; it it used to implement the fibre channel protocol. On the other hand, the EFI "firmware" is in fact an EFI driver embedded in a 2nd flash ROM on the card which is loaded by the EFI when booting the server. vPars themselves also go a bit deeper and I won't go too much in details here but they require an additional layer named fPars, or firmware partitions (Alan Hymes from HP has good slides on this), and that EFI firmware must support them if you're running vPars.

I hope this clears things up for you. Good luck with your firmware update endeavours!

O.